HeTexted: Are we really ready to crowdsource love online?

I suppose it was inevitable that in a world of Google and Twoogle where we just cannot bear to figure anything out on our own we would end up asking the internet to decide the fate of our love lives. Really? I thought dating sites was as far as the internet’s reach into romantic affairs went. Apparently not.

Enter HeTexted, a site that helps you crowdsource advice about a potential significant other. No I am not making this up, TechCrunch even wrote about it. It’s a real thing.

The site describes itself as “the first Q&A service dedicated to dating questions”. Essentially what the site allows is for women (yes it’s for women) to upload messages from their potential someone and other women get to vote whether or not he is into them or not. Sounds like a book a friend gave me once that got turned into a movie.

As TC’s Romain Dillet describes it:

“We are not talking about IPOs, funding stories or new Angry Birds games here. We are talking about love. Love is something sacred in France. It is as innocent as a beautiful sunrise above the Eiffel Tower, as fresh as a croissant coming out of the oven, as delicate as Amélie’s music.”

I may or not be a romantic but shouldn’t some things be sacred from the internet? I know some of you may have met you future partners on Twitter and most (and probably the best part) of your relationship may have played out online but crowdsorucing advice based on text messages with very little context? When did the internet become Yoda?

How did an idea like this come about really?

“Basically, it was just an observation,” Lisa Winning, founder of HeTexted, said in an interview with the Huffington Post. “My girlfriends were constantly talking about it — they’d come back from dates and be almost obsessive about analyzing what the text messages meant and what their next move should be.”

So women have a tendency to be a tad obsessive about dating and the guys they are dating. If their girlfriends aren’t solving this problem how does HeTexted hope to actually solve it online? Well, I am glad you asked. The site has quite cleverly added a feature called, “Ask a bro” where women get the male perceptive, because the “bros” Mason and Ben have a “certain kind of dating history” and one of them is called the “dude whisperer” and the other is “kind of a douchebag” who knows other douchebags. Again I am not making this up.

“We very much want the site to feel like you’re talking to your friends. So these are guys that have a certain kind of dating history,” Carrie Henderson McDermott, the other co-Founder of Hetexted told HuffPo. “Eventually we would really love to grow the ‘Ask A Bro’ a section and make it more of a guest edit celebrity spotlight.”

Here are some samples of the texts that the site enjoys.

And then there is this lot:

The site is free and anyone can sign up and create a profile and upload messages or they can do it anonymously. Question: why aren’t guys allowed to post texts? Are we assuming that men don’t have dating problems?

Thanks to social media so much of our lives play out online… but have we reached the point where crowdsourcing relationship advice is necessary?

[Hat Tip: TechCrunch]

Author | Mich Atagana

Mich started out life wanting to be a theoretical physicist but soon realized that mathematics was required. So, she promptly let go of that dream. She then decided that law might be the best place for her talents, but with too many litigation classes missed in favour of feminist... More